Off With The Blinders

Insight is a tremendous gift, and a key part of insight is self-awareness. I’ve worked in “helping professions” all my life, and it has often struck me how much of a disadvantage it is for a person to be lacking these things. Without them, coping well is almost impossible.

Of course, we all have our blind spots. When we do come to an understanding about ourselves that is not especially attractive, or when that is pointed out by a friend or a counsellor, it’s painful. We may have been operating under the misapprehension of a terrible truth: our desire to protect someone we love is actually smothering, our willingness to overextend ourselves masks a deep inner isolation, or we are, more commonly, simply clueless. As they say, the truth hurts.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks His disciples a perfectly human question: “who do people say that I am?” Naturally, we are all curious about what other people think of us, but Jesus is not looking for superficial compliments. This episode occurs more than halfway through Matthew, a Gospel about identity, so, by now, it is a reasonable query: Jesus’ inner circle would have been with Him for a while at this point. Not only would they have picked up on the scuttlebutt, but they would have come to some insights of their own. It makes sense to ask them.

At first, they respond with the scuttlebutt: they’ve heard others refer to Jesus as a prophet, along the lines of Elijah or, more recently, John the Baptist. But Jesus doesn’t leave it at that: the next question is more important. “But who do you say that I am?” It’s Peter who responds with conviction: “You are the Messiah,” he exclaims, “the Son of the living God.”

For all of Peter’s impulsivity and heedlessness, he got hold of a critical insight: perhaps the most critical in all human history. The man for whom he left everything was indeed the Son of God. Peter isn’t wandering after some guru because he’s bored with a career in fishing. He has gotten hold of an existential truth. Jesus was his friend and role model to be sure, but He was, at the same time, the Messiah. Right there, in the flesh. Peter would not have understood Trinitarian theology, but, for all his simplicity, he had the insight that Jesus was not merely some reincarnated prophet.

That insight led him to glory but through, one assumes, some very dark roads: betrayal, loss, persecution and his own crucifixion. Knowing what little we do about him, it’s safe to say he bungled through quite a bit of it.

But he was not wearing blinders. I think that a big part of his grasping this most important insight was that whatever was to happen would be worth it, and he had to see that straight on.

Am I able to get rid of my own blinders – and they are plenty – to come to the same conclusion?